Overview

Bank Saint Petersburg was founded in 1990 and is one of the largest regional banks in Russia. The Bank operates in St. Petersburg, Leningrad Region, Moscow, and Kaliningrad and has demonstrated stable and consistent results in all major financial services markets over the past decade. Its priorities include arranging credit, payments, and cash management, servicing both legal entities and individuals operating in the foreign exchange market and interbank loans market and securities. Its in-house processing centre allows the Bank to provide the highest level of support and service for credit card holders. With a combination of strategic planning, consistent financial policy, and adherence to its business values, the Bank has earned and maintained a reputation for financial stability, strength, and reliability.

Challenges

Financial institutions are a prime target for cybercriminals. Having proper protection is essential to defend against targeted attacks, as any incident or related downtime can result in financial losses and damage to the Bank’s reputation. While third-party software can help, integration with the existing infrastructure and compatibility concerns had to be addressed. Bank Saint Petersburg has the additional challenge of being geographically dispersed, with a large network of branch offices and data centres. Essential to its business, the Bank needed to provide a secure email exchange and identify, quarantine, and stop attacks. Due to the distributed nature of the Bank’s information security system, it’s information security (IS) team needed a solution to help them act quickly, determine whether contamination had occurred, localise the problem, and develop an algorithm for further action.

"The Trend Micro product satisfied our two most important indicators: it showed the best results in comparative tests, and it ensured full compatibility with our specialised critical software."

Denis Shurov,Head of Department for Introduction and
Development of Technical Support and
Security Equipment, Bank Saint Petersburg

Why Trend Micro

To secure its electronic corporate correspondence, the Bank launched a large-scale pilot project that included Trend Micro™ Deep Discovery™ Email Inspector as one of four products from different vendors installed at the Bank side-by-side. The pilot allowed for the observation and evaluation of their performance and accuracy. Carried out in real-time, the comprehensive evaluation monitored both the Bank’s actual email traffic and fabricated email, which introduced known vulnerabilities to the test environment. In addition, during one of the pilot testing iterations, a real targeted attack occurred, which allowed them to compare the competing products during a real security event.

The tests compared all the products’ ability to detect and rapidly respond to attacks. Among all the products tested, Deep Discovery Email Inspector demonstrated solid performance results. In addition to the number of detected threats and the speed of detection, the solution’s compatibility with the Bank’s specialised critical software also played a decisive role. “Deep Discovery Email Inspector satisfied our two most important indicators - it showed the best results in comparative tests, and it ensured full compatibility with our specialised critical software,” said Denis Shurov, head of the department for the introduction and development of technical and security equipment at Bank Saint Petersburg.

"Technical support from Trend Micro helped us customise the product to meet our specific requirements. Its localisation is one more plus."

Denis Shurov,Head of Department for Introduction and
Development of Technical Support and
Security Equipment, Bank Saint Petersburg

Solution

Deep Discovery Email Inspector creates an isolated environment to block targeted attacks, spear phishing, and ransomware in real-time. It functions in the network and interacts with the existing solutions for protecting mail gateways and servers. To ensure business continuity, the implementation of Deep Discovery Email Inspector was finely tuned over a four-month period and any issues were promptly resolved with the help of Trend Micro’s technical support.

“Technical support from Trend Micro helped us customise the product to meet our specific requirements. Its localisation is another bonus. When corresponding with foreign support, there is always a time lag to get your answers and some language barriers. With Trend Micro, we received prompt replies in Russian,” said Shurov.

Results

Since its launch, Deep Discovery Email Inspector has blocked 98% of the attacks, including four large-scale, long-lasting targeted attacks. The solution’s attack prevention mode made it possible to significantly reduce the time spent by the IS and IT departments on localising and eliminating threats. Deep Discovery Email Inspector currently works almost completely autonomously, allowing the Bank’s IT and IS resources to work on a specialised service to analyse and prevent information security related situations, including intrusion attempts.

What's Next

Looking ahead, the Bank plans to improve the resiliency of its IT infrastructure and increase the capacities of its current equipment. Bank Saint Petersburg is interested in continuing its relationship with Trend Micro, including conducting additional training and providing seminars to upgrade its staff’s qualifications. The Bank is also considering testing and introducing additional Trend Micro products.